A fast-paced, realistic simulation of WWII aerial combat. ____________________________________________________ The basic game will be shipped in the Wave 1. All other items (expansions, add-ons, etc.) will be shipped later – in the Wave 2. A separate shipping fee will be charged for each shipping wave, calculated by the package weight (using customary units - oz): <17oz (~0,5kg) = $18 <35oz (~1,0kg) = $20 <52oz (~1,5kg) = $22 <70oz (~2,0kg) = $24 <88oz (~2,5kg) = $26 <105oz (~3,0kg) = $28 <123oz (~3,5kg) = $31 <141oz (~4,0kg) = $33 <158oz (~4,5kg) = $35 <176oz (~5,0kg) = $37 >176oz (>5kg) = $41
In the past period, we resolved important doubts related to some maneuvers and the interaction of Air-Ground and Ground-Air operations, and graphical examples are in work.
In this update, we publish several pages that are completely finished, and we'll publish the next pages in the following update.
In the previous period, we made progress in the finalization of this project. We are advancing with the authors’ work on completing the rules at a variable pace. Sometimes we are extremely satisfied with the progress made in a single day, but sometimes we are stuck in place for several days. Compared to the previous game (AoD:WWI), this game is more demanding to play, as there are many more parameters to monitor during the game. The reasons for this are historical, since planes and tactics were much more complex compared to WWI. In addition, we, the authors, want the game to get a higher level of realism, but also to keep the simplicity of playing. Therefore, we want to fully comply with the principle of MCMD: Minimum Complexity, Maximum Diversity.
Your patience has really been tremendous, and we feel we have your support to complete the game in the best way possible, and we are extremely grateful for that. Nevertheless, we feel the pressure; in addition to the fact that we are late with the project, the surrounding situation is worrying us. The conditions for doing business are getting more difficult, so we are anxiously following all developments, especially regarding the prices of materials on the market. Fortunately, we have already completed the physical production of the vast majority of components. In the past period, all the control panels have been finished.
There was a some free space on one of the sheets left, which we used to insert an additional control panel. In that space, we put the control panel for 3 Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-10 planes, so 3 more black tokens will be included in the set, as well as the corresponding stickers with those planes. It will be a Kickstarter exclusive, as our symbolic reward for your patience. By the way, that type of aircraft is represented in the Additional Aircraft: German Fighters add-on (with designations 178, 179, 180, and 181).
In addition to the control panel, we also printed the terrain markers. That component was not announced at all during the campaign; that's something that we, the authors, decided to add to the set. It is an entire B3 sheet of high-quality laminated cardboard, printed in full color.
When we had already decided to show the effects of air-surface operations in much more detail in the game, the need to add something like that to the set became apparent. Bombardment from low altitudes and strafing effects cannot be shown the way they should be if the configuration of the terrain is not taken into account. Many targets are located between or in the mountains, so there are only certain directions that allow an attack. This drastically increases the variety and realism of the scenarios and the entire game in general.
Thus, the terrain markers represent hills and mountains. Yellow dots (hexes) show parts of the terrain that are above the altitude level LL, so that aircraft that fly at the lowest altitude (stand LL) cannot fly over them. The orange hexes represent the points on the board that are at an altitude of about 1000 meters. The red hexes represent points on the ground that are at an altitude of about 2000 meters, so the planes on stands LL, L1 and L2 cannot fly over them.
In the Update 28, we announced a soon launch of a Kickstarter campaign that would feature two games we created a long time ago - Water Polo and Mini Golf. We set up a new profile on Kickstarter under the name Forsage Light Games, as the main Forsage Games profile has become recognizable in the past years for more complex, usually battle themed games. In the future, the new profile will feature campaigns for simpler games for children, educational games, family games, etc. We hope that this project will be successful and that it will help employ our production resources for the next few months, which would also help us, the authors, to have the peace of mind, to be able to fully commit to the AoD:WWII rules. We invested only several working days for this new project, and everything else related to the campaign and the realization of this project was handed to Stefan, the newest member of our team. In order to minimize the involvement of the authors, we decided not to offer Water Polo at this point, but only Mini Golf.
The game Mini Golf was created in 2010, it had a version in 2017, and compared to that version, we've added some components (vertical obstacles), and the design was changed. The new version of the game is called Carom Mini Golf. The Kickstarter campaign starts today, March 2 at 18:00 CET.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2078586680/carom-mini-golf
Your support as a backer or promoter on social networks would be extremely important to us. Our team, as always, wants to reward its loyal backers (loyalty gift), and in this case, for all of you who support this project, the gift would be a set of 3 Hawker Typhoon Mk I Aplanes for the AoD:WWII game (control panel, tokens and stickers). That aircraft type is part of the Additional Aircraft: British Fighters add-on. If you have any other suggestion for that gift aircraft, it would certainly add to the gift value as a real tailored exclusive, so feel free to participate.
While we are working on the game rules, we have prepared the majority of Print and Play files. The files have just been distributed through BackerKit pledge manager, and they include aircraft tokens, control panels, board, task markers, STL files and other elements that are finished in design. The rest of the PnP files (rulebook, scenarios, etc.) will be prepared and sent later, when the final version of the rules is written.
In the next update, we will publish the progress of the rulebook.
In the last period, we have printed all the stickers for aircraft tokens.
Now those stickers are being cut on our plotter, and they will soon be attached to plastic tokens (only for backers who ordered the Pre-assembled set).
Simultaneously, we have been working on the control panel design.
We will wait a little longer before sending the control panel sheets to print so that we can check thoroughly for misspelling or design errors (if any).
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After each Kickstarter project, Forsage Games invested in its own production facilities. This gives us as authors the freedom to create games entirely according to the original ideas, as we do not have to adapt components to manufacturer templates of any sort. In this field, we have also shown innovation and creativity, for example, altitude stands have proven to be simple, reliable, very practical and relatively cheap to manufacture. When games and expansions are produced in our workshop, we can start production without a large order size, which is something we would have to do when using the services of some big printing house in Serbia, China or some other country. That's why we can offer many expansions (primarily related to the existing and upcoming games of the Age of Dogfights series). We have acquired some machinery and tools and leased or purchased enough space to allow us to independently manufacture most components in large or small batches. Due to all the above-mentioned reasons, we intend to keep investing in production capacities in the coming period as well.
Most of the game components for AoD2 have been finished a long time ago, and while waiting for the authors to finish the final version of the rulebook, we have some unused production capacity. This creates additional costs for us, so we decided to set in motion some of our "old" projects. These are mostly simple games that belong to the category of children's or family games. Before we started our Kickstarter journey, we created several dozen such games that were intended primarily for the domestic (Serbian) market.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/80163/predrag-lazovic
Only some of those games (Mini Golf and Water polo) got adapted for the global market a few years ago, but they never had their own Kickstarter campaign or any promotion or advertisement.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/174235/mini-golf
https://www.gamesforsage.com/product-page/mini-golf
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/174596/water-polo-light-edition
https://www.gamesforsage.com/product-page/water-polo
We believe these games are exceptional in their respective categories, so they will too have their own campaign on Kickstarter, with only minimal changes and additions to the current versions. The project will be led by a new member of our Forsage Games team - Stefan. Given that this existing account Forsage Games on Kickstarter became recognized for war and battle-themed games - we decided to create a new account: Forsage Light Games, which will be involved in campaigns for games of other categories. The first campaign can be expected at the end of January or the beginning of February this year. We hope that some of our "old" backers will also support this project, as it would mean a lot to the survival and further development of our company.
The authors continue to work on wrapping up the final version of the rulebook. In the previous period, among other things, a lot of time (more than planned) was spent on determining the final characteristics of all aircraft from the base game. In addition to those, the characteristics of many aircraft from the expansions have been established, especially the ones that appear several times in different versions. Also, the aircraft drawings from the base game are finalized.
For some aircraft types that either had only one production version or don't notably differ in characteristics between versions, the version mark is omitted and we have chosen to show drawings of the most famous or most numerous version (e.g. Me 410, He 177, Do 24, Swordfish, etc.). This way they can, depending on the scenario and the period in which the battle takes place, represent various versions of the aircraft. On the other hand, aircraft that had different versions are represented as a specific version and sometimes, if needed, a sub-version. For example, the Bf 109 appears in following versions (in various expansions): D, E-1, E-1/B, E-3, E-3a, E-4, E-4/B, E-5, E-7, F-2, F-4/Trop, G-4, G-6/U4, G-10, H-1 and K-4.
At the beginning of the project, we planned to determine and implement around twenty characteristics for each aircraft type: speed, number of full throttle uses, booster, agility, ability to perform sharp turns and aerobatics, service ceiling, climb speed, descent speed, diving ability, type of weapons and firepower, ammunition capacity (number of bursts) and optional variable firepower after several bursts, firing directions and firepower for defensive machine guns, endurance, durability, ability to carry load, ability to take photos. During the work on the rules, we decided to introduce a few more characteristics (stall speed, ability to fly zig-zag, reduced durability from the front if the plane has a vulnerable glass nose, etc). All the characteristics affect aircraft’s ability to carry out their tasks - dogfight, bombing, reconnaissance, etc.
The older of the two authors of the game (Predrag) has been passionately collecting and reading aviation literature (he owns several hundred books, magazines and models) for fifty years. He gained a lot of knowledge about aircraft construction and flight mechanics while studying Aeronautical Engineering at Belgrade University. Prior knowledge is necessary to analyse and finally determine the characteristics of all the aircraft, since there is a lot of information that is vague, incorrect, controversial, or at least unverified (especially on the Internet). All that data had to be converted into compatible numbers to fit the rules of the game. The result is a game where aircraft use their advantages (e.g. higher speed, or better maneuvrability, or better climbing, etc.) just like in real air battles.
The most basic aircraft data from different sources mostly matches, but there are also some that contradicts. It is difficult to get to the facts about some less important characteristics (e.g. stall speed) especially for less important planes. Some data, for example for speed and climbing speed are given in different units of measurement, but it is all easy to convert. A slightly more complex calculation is to determine the rate of climb when there is only a small amount of data, for example, that a certain aircraft type climbs, say, to an altitude of 10,000 feet in 14 minutes, and although it's easy to calculate the average rate of climb, sometimes it's not comparable with data for other aircraft.
A separate problem is data that is almost non-existent in the literature. Here, above all, we mean maneuverability in the horizontal plane (the "agility" characteristic in this game). If there is some data, it is mostly incomparable with data on any other aircraft. Maneuverability can be expressed in the time it takes for the aircraft to complete a 180 or a 360-degree turn; for some aircraft, there is information about the minimum turn radius, but even such data must be accompanied (and most often they are not) by additional information such as at which altitude the turn is performed, at what speed, with what load (full or half empty tank, additional load, etc.), and again it needs to be comparable with other data in order to be useful.
Since we now have a way to make fine differences in agility between aircraft types (as described in the Update 22), it became more difficult to decide the values. For example, the information for the Focke-Wulf Fw 189 found in literature says that it was "very agile for a twin-engined aircraft", but now an assessment has to be made on whether it is more agile than the single-engined Thunderbolt fighter (P-47), which was described as a "flying brick''. Various versions of a certain type of aircraft are also a problem. In general, the newer versions of the aircraft got stronger (and heavier) engines, so they were faster than the older versions, but due to the increased weight, they were also less agile. For each subversion, it was necessary to assess if they lost enough agility in reality to make a difference in the game.
It is widely believed that the British Hurricane Mk I and Spitfire Mk I fighters were more agile than the Messerschmitt Bf 109 E during the Battle of Britain. However, when all the calculations are made based on the geometric and aerodynamic characteristics of those aircraft, the conclusion is that the Messerschmitt was certainly more maneuverable than the Hurricane, and probably than the Spitfire as well. Author Len Deighton proves this in his book "Fighter". However, when some other factors are taken into account, such as the strength of the aircraft (the wings in particular), the psychology of the pilots and the tactical circumstances during the Battle of Britain, we can reach a different conclusion. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 had relatively fragile wings. Only the version (E) had cannons in the wings, which had a double negative effect on strength: increased wing weight and vibrations due to firing. Sometimes (although very rarely) the plane's wings broke during sharp maneuvers. German pilots knew this, so they avoided exposing their aircraft to the maximum load by turning too sharp. During air combat, the most common tactical situation was the following: the British fighters were directed at the German bombers, and they entered the fight while they were still in the climbing phase, and the German escort fighters were at a much higher altitude. Using the height and additional speed in the dive, the Messerschmitts attacked the British fighters from above. After the first surge, they would return to the fight in a rapid climb using the inertia gained from the previous dive. It’s for these reasons that they emphasized combat and maneuvering in the vertical plane, not because they were afraid of nimble British fighters. The British had an additional reason to avoid fighting in the vertical plane - the carburetors in the Merlin engines of their fighters skipped one stroke during a sudden transition into a dive, which would have caused them to lose speed for a short time. All in all, regardless of the cause, the fact is that the British preferred fighting in the horizontal, and the Germans in the vertical plane. The authors, taking everything into account, decided that Spitfires Mk I have slightly better maneuverability than the Messerschmitt Bf 109 E.
A similar problem exists with durability. Data for durability, if there is any at all, are mostly flat-out descriptive: very strong, strong, weak construction and the like. To assign a value for durability, aircraft are divided into categories: single-engine, twin-engine, multi-engine. We took into account whether the planes have engines with water cooling (in-line engines) or air cooling (radial engines), and also whether the planes have armored parts. Some commonly known facts, for example, that Japanese aircraft are very fragile, that the P-47 was known for its exceptional strength, and the like were also considered.
All real characteristics are converted into numerical values according to some tables or criteria. For example, the value for firepower takes into account the number, caliber and rate of fire of guns. The value of firepower must have some logical correlation with the values of durability. The descriptions of battles from books written by fighter pilots (Pierre Klosterman, Saburo Sakai, Peter Townsend, Alexander I. Pokryshkin, V. F. Golubev) are very important, for example, the one that it would have taken several Zero planes to fire long bursts at the B-17 in order to shoot it down.
We have made an effort to find at least two independent sources for each piece of information. Even so, we cannot claim with 100% certainty that all data is absolutely correct. If we find new, reliable data that would be different from what is currently available, the subsequent editions of the AoD:WWII game will feature that change.
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With the drawings and features of the aircraft complete, the token stickers are to be printed soon, and after that, the control panels. Drawings of tokens with written characteristics will be inserted into the rulebook examples, so in the next update, we will publish the pages that fully show the movement of the aircraft.
Once again, we are extremely grateful for your patience, which is allowing us to complete the rules for this very demanding and large game the best we can.